Other Presents

Very enjoyable, the special section on alternate history (September), though the North might have won the war sooner if McClellan had taken that minnié ball in 1861.

My own favorite: Theodore Roosevelt does not survive the 1912 assassination attempt. Taft is re-elected and keeps the United States out of the Great War. Wilhelmine Germany wins the war; preserves the Russian monarchy and restores the French one; annexes Alsace-Lorraine, the Ukraine, and the Russian-administered portion of Poland; divests France of North Africa and Indochina and Britain of India, the Suez Canal, and East Africa; and shoots Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a minor agent for whom the Abwehr has no further use. Results: no bolshevism, no national socialism, no Wilsonian fantasypolitik, no Great Depression, no World War II, and an entirely different historical momentum for the United States—perhaps expanding westward into the Pacific, northward by secession and plebiscite into western Canada all the way to Alaska, and southward into the other Americas as the world’s paramount naval power, while Germany, the supreme military power, dominates the Eurasian landmass and Africa.